Amanda Marcotte interviewed me for her series RealityCast, on RH Reality Check. You can listen to the interview here (my interview starts around 4 minutes and 20 seconds). Thanks to Amanda for inviting me to be on the series!
Blogosphere
Blog spotlight: Pushed birth
Jennifer Block, author of Pushed: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care has a new (started in August) blog about childbirth. Check it out at pushedbirth.com. She defines a pushed birth as:
A pushed birth is one that is induced, sped up, and/or heavily medicated for no good reason, and all too often concludes with surgery, invasive instruments, an episiotomy, or a bad vaginal tear — outcomes you don’t want.
Cool stuff. She has a sweet map on the site showing in what states midwifery is legal and illegal.
More about Birth on Labor Day
A longer piece that I wrote about the play Birth is up at RH Reality Check. Check it out here.
And I’m back!
Hi folks–
I hope your last few weeks were as restful as mine. I’m happy to be back and blogging away. To start things off again, you can check out my post on Bush vs. Choice, the NARAL Pro-Choice America blog. I wrote as part of a series commemorating the one-year anniversary of the approval of emergency contraception over the counter.
Radical doula takes a break…
Dear readers–
I will be on a blogging hiatus for the next twelve days, as I take a vacation away from email and internet usage. Check out the awesome thoughts of the writers on my blog roll while I’m gone. Peace.
Guest blogging at Feministing this week!
So I have been asked to guest blog over at Feministing.com this week, while Jessica and her sister are away on vacation. I may cross post some of what I write–but check out their site this week for more from me (including topics I wouldn’t normally write about on Radical Doula). Thanks again to Jessica for this awesome opportunity!
Blogs that makes me think
There has been a recent series of post entitled “Thinking Blogs.” I’m kind of new to the concept, but it seems that if you get mentioned in someone’s list of blogs that make you think, you’re supposed to post your own. Bean from Lawyers, Guns and Money (thanks Bean!) linked to me in her series a while back…so now its my turn. 🙂
I’m supposed to link here, and then list 5 (?) blogs that make me think. I’m kind of new to the blogosphere, so I don’t have a long list of surprising and undiscovered blogs. But here is my short list anyway:
1) No Impact Man: I haven’t put him on my blog roll, because it feels too distant from the issues I write about here, but I read his blog everyday. He (and his family) are doing a one year experiment on no-impact living, meaning trying to have a zero sum impact on the environment. It means a lot of things for them, including all locally grown food, no electricity consumption, no waste creation, no driving, to name a few. Check it out if you want to be forced to think about your impact on the environment in a very thoughtful way.
2) Feministing.com: Not a surprising choice, I know, but they are still my constant and ever thought-provoking source for daily news and witty feminist critique.
3)Dykes to Watch Out For: This might be a non-conventional choice, because its not really a political blog, a more of a live journal style site. But graphic artist Alison Bechdel is awesome, particularly her recent highly-acclaimed graphic memoir Fun Home. Read it, it will blow you away. Oh, and in her strip Dykes to Watch Out For, she once had a character named Miriam (my first name) who was a crunchy lesbian midwife. It definitely felt like a sign from above.
So I’m going to leave it at that. Enjoy!
Making the connection between pro-choice activists and birth activists
Lynn Paltrow, the Executive Director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women and a pioneer in the reproductive justice field, has a great article in TomPaine today which eloquently clarifies why there needs to be more coalition work between abortion rights activists and birth activists.
Both pro-choice advocates and birthing rights advocates are challenged by decreasing access to services: the former struggles with the fact that 87 percent of all U.S. counties have no abortion providers; the latter struggles against policies at over 300 hospitals around the country that deny women who have previously had c-sections the right to even try delivering vaginally.
And both have been negatively affected by growing claims of “fetal rights.” While these are advanced as part of the campaign to outlaw abortion, they have begun to effect the lives of women who personally identify as “pro-life.” Christian fundamentalists have been told that they must have unnecessary c-sections to protect the rights of the fetus; pregnant women opposed to abortions have been arrested as child abusers in the name of fetal rights for things they did or did not do during pregnancy.
Read the rest of the article here.
a new blog is born…
Hello everyone! After immense amounts of thought and consideration, as well as some peer pressure from awesome fellow feminist bloggers recently (special thanks to Julie and Milbydaniel) I have decided to enter into the feminist blogosphere.
I want to acknowledge the awesome bloggers who have paved the way and really made this medium something that matters politically, socially and intellectually. You all rock, and we amateurs could only hope to live up to the high standards you have set for us. Particular shout out to feministing, who was the first blog I ever read diligently.
So what is this blog going to be about? That presumably will develop as I do, but my initial idea (and dare I say niche) is to focus on the politics of reproductive justice activism from the perspective of a radical doula.
I just threw out a lot of terms that necessitate defining, which I will do here, with the caveat that some of these terms are new and developing, and I welcome the input of others to help broaden and refine their definitions. This blog is meant to be a conversation about what these terms mean, how we can actually live out our politics, and what are the relevant issues at hand.
PS I promise not to overuse the cheesy birth puns
Radical Doula 